The AOpen COM5232 is not a bad drive, though it is fairly vanilla. Some of AOpen's advanced CDRW technology did not make it to this drive which is a shame because those features would have rounded out the combo drive much better. It certainly could have used the Just Speed feature for sure.

Although Just Link wasn't present, the buffer under run protection worked well. While burning files on to a CD at 52x, I defragged the folder it was copying from, and ran a virus scan on that drive. The burn times increased by about 30 seconds longer than when the PC was left alone. The burn worked just fine, save for the Teac drive being unable to read the disc.

There are some slight 52x audio extraction issues, and this occurred on a number of audio CDs. They are not as severe as they were on the CRW5232, but they are still present. I will have to say that this drive can get pretty noisy at full speed and it's a shame the Speed Boost function could not make its way to this drive.

Although I did not display them, the speeds compared to the AOpen CRW5232 numbers (which is a similar dive in terms of raw speed) were quite close. Overall, the CRW5232 had a slight edge, but only by a second or two. DVD playback was unspectacular, meaning it just worked, which is all I could really ask. At $45 USD, the price is definitely right as it has the ability to burn CDs and read DVDs as well.